Fall 2008 Colloquia

For a printable Coffee Colloquium schedule please click here.

The Center for Body, Mind, and Culture is presenting the following speakers in our ongoing coffee colloquium series:

Wednesday, September 17, 2008-Coffee Colloquium: 11:00 am  in  AH 105 ( History seminar room), Professor Oliver Buckton ( English)  will discuss: 

"Robert Louis Stevenson, William Gladstone, and the Politics of Late-Victorian Masculinity"

    Early in 1884 Britain’s Liberal Prime Minister, William Gladstone, controversially refused to involve large numbers of British troops in the nationalist revolt against Egyptian rule in the Soudan, instead sending the British military hero General Charles Gordon with a small force to defend the capital, Khartoum. Gordon’s doomed attempt to defend Khartoum and his violent death at the hands of the Mahdi--the leader of the revolt--prompted outrage in Britain. Among the most outspoken of Gladstone’s critics was Robert Louis Stevenson, who had recently published his popular romance, Treasure Island. Dismissing Gladstone’s praise of the novel--“he would do better to attend to the imperial affairs of England”--Stevenson described Gladstone as “a man of fog, evasions…and a general deliquescence of the spine.” Stevenson’s attack on Gladstone’s government suggested a crisis of British masculine identity, arguing that England lacked “one spark of manly sensibility” and describing Britain’s government as “impotent and small.” The attack on Gladstone coincided with Stevenson’s completion of Prince Otto, a novel about an ineffectual ruler in an imaginary state that he described as “my chief o’ works” but which was poorly received and failed to live up to its author’s expectations. Though recent critics have pointed to the political significance of this novel--John Kucich suggesting that Prince Otto was the “most virulent of Stevenson’s many attacks on Socialism, and his diatribes against Gladstone were slanderous”--the novel has remained a footnote in Victorian literary studies, and my presentation will explore in more detail both the political resonances of this neglected text, and the use of contested representations of masculinity for political purposes in late-Victorian Britain.

     Dr. Buckton , professor of English at FAU, is the Author of two books, Secret Selves: Confession and Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography and Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008-Coffee Colloquium: 11:00 am  in  AH 105 ( History seminar room),  Professor Michael Horswell  (Languages and Linguistics) will discuss:

 "Re-writing Imperial Subjects of Treason: Amazons and Cañaris in Spanish Transatlantic Literature"

    Reading the late Renaissance mestizo historian Inca Garcilaso and the baroque Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina’s representations of imperial betrayal together provides an opportunity to consider how early modern subjects negotiated both personal and political circumstances that made “treason” a compelling theme for both historiography and theatre. Both authors wrote significant works on the Pizarro rebellion of the 1540’s, an event that marked the Inca Garcilaso’s life until his dying day, and influenced how he wrote significant parts of the monumental Historia General del Perú. Tirso de Molina, on the other hand, was hired by Pizarro descendents to write the three plays known as the Pizarro trilogy, of which one play, Amazonas en las Indias, treats the rebellion and attempts to redeem Gonzalo’s role in it. In both these works, ethnicity and gender are important markers of identity that are performed in complex ways.
    Inca Garcilaso represents the Pizarro rebellion with a well-known and specific, personal goal: to redeem his father’s name, whose honor had been vilified for assisting Gonzalo against the Spanish emperor’s representative, and thus to secure his own financial security and honor in late 16th century Spain. Instead of working with the chapters directly related with the Inca Garcilaso’s representation of the rebellion, however, I will instead suggest that this theme informs how the author discusses other examples of “treason” in the colonial moment, specifically how he narrates a powerful scene of ethnic recriminations between Incas and Cañaris, and thus gives voice to the inequities suffered by conquered peoples, imperial subjects such as himself who fight to gain recognition and standing in the post-Conquest empire. 
    Tirso de Molina’s drama, written some twenty years later, takes up the themes of rebellion and treason by staging the continued conquest of the “Indias” by Gonzalo and company, represented by the Amazon characters they engage in battle in the first scenes. Tirso subtly embeds in the dialogues and action of the play historical intrigues surrounding Gonzalo’s rebellion, but rewrites official accounts to favor his patron’s family honor. Central to this redemption is how he has Gonzalo rejecting the amorous advances of the Amazons and marrying his mestiza niece, Francisca, daughter of Francisco Pizarro, a marriage that was actually attempted before his untimely execution.
    As in the Inca Garcilaso’s case, here Tirso gives voice to the complexities of both ethnicity and gender, as mestiza Incas displace non-Inca Indians (Amazons) and imperial conquest and colonization, while figured in recognizable gendered ways, is also put into question through a proto-populist discourse in which the “people” implore Gonzalo to rebel against the emperor. Both authors, therefore, left readers and spectators with subtle negations of imperial hegemonic discourse, inspired by obvious personal gains and perhaps by moral commentary they both wished to advance in the context of early 17th century debates on the efficacy and justice of imperial Spain’s transatlantic enterprise.

 Dr. Horswell, an associate professor of Latin American literature and Spanish at Florida Atlantic University, is the author of Decolonizing the Sodomite: Queer Tropes of Sexuality in Colonial Andean Culture.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008-Coffee Colloquium: 11:00 am  in  AH 105 ( History seminar room),  Professor Benno Lowe  ( History) will discuss:

"Commonwealth and Reformation: Protestantism and the Politics of Religious Change in the Gloucester Vale (1350-1560)"

Most interpretations of the popular Reformation focus on the amount of theological and liturgical receptivity for Protestantism, while ignoring the more tangible rewards the new faith trumpeted.  The evidence for reformation in the English city of Gloucester and the surrounding countryside, however, suggests that popular support for religious change was much more complex. The burgesses and gentry there adopted the royal supremacy for political reasons somewhat grudgingly, but then came to embrace the broader Protestant message in large part because it was rooted in the biblical idea that the gospel of Christ obligated all good Christians to work toward the common good.  As a result, much of the expropriated monastic and chantry wealth went to charitable endowments, such as hospitals, schools, and almshouses, while the laity simultaneously assumed jurisdiction over social welfare.  The early Protestant social ethic repudiated harsh economic disparities as unchristian, and for as long as there was hope among the English people for governmental redress and social progress, little resistance arose against the new church.

Dr. Lowe, associate professor of History at Florida Atlantic University, is the Author of  Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas.

Previous Colloquia

Thursday, April 17, 2008 - Coffee Colloquium: Dr. Susan Love Brown spoke about American individualist anarchism from 2-3:30 PM in FAU's room AH 105. Brown, associate professor of anthropology and acting director of comparative studies at FAU, is the editor of Intentional Community: An Anthropological Perspective and the co-author of Meeting Anthropology Phase to Phase. She has published on topics varying from Ayn Rand and Anarcho-Capitalism to ethnography in the Bahamas and a yoga community called Ananda Village.

Monday, March 17, 2008 - Coffee Colloquium: From 2 - 3:30 PM in FAU's room AH 105, Frederick E. Greenspahn, Gimelstob Eminent Scholar in Judaic Studies, discussed "Jewish Theologies of Scripture." Greenspahn suggests, "It is common in the study of religion for unfamiliar traditions to be treated as structurally similar to those that are familiar. That fallacy is responsible for the assumption that the Bible plays the same role in Judaism as in (Protestant) Christianity. A survey of Jewish thought on the matter reveals three broad understandings of the Bible's role, some of which are quite distinct from what is commonly assumed." Dr. Greenspahn is Director of the Jewish Studies Program at FAU.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008 - Coffee Colloquium: At 2:30 PM, poet, biographer, and literary critic, Mark Scroggins, discussed his new book, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky. For more information about FAU Associate Professor of English Mark Scroggins, click here. For more information about the event, contact the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture. To learn more about The Poem of a Life, click here. This event took place in FAU's room AH105.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - Coffee Colloquium: From 4:00 - 5:00 PM in AH 108, Lester Embree, William F. Dietrich Eminent Scholar, spoke about the "Phenomenology of Nursing." For more information about the event, contact the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture. For more information about Professor of Philosophy Lester Embree, click here or here.

Tuesday, October 23 - Coffee Colloquium: At 4:30 PM in AH 108, National Book Award finalist Susan Mitchell discussed the "Poetic Process as Menage à Trois." For more information about poet and professor Susan Mitchell, click here. For more information about the event, contact the Center.

March 12, 2 PM Coffee Colloquium, History Seminar Room, Ken Holloway, Assistant Professor of History and Levenson Professor of Asian Studies discussed “Opposing Views on Chinese Government”

April 9, 2007 - Coffee Colloquium : "Food and Self" presented by Wen-ying Xu
Xu writes: "In this short presentation, I will argue that food, as the most significant medium of the traffic between the inside and outside of our bodies, organizes, signifies, and legitimates our sense of self in distinction from others who practice different foodways. Food not only nourishes but also signifies. Cuisine, the process of transforming raw materials into safe, nourishing, and pleasing dishes, is central to our subjectivity, because this transformation operates in 'the register of the imagination' more than of the material. I will also briefly demonstrate how to read food in literature."